Saturday, September 10, 2011

Most of my summer was spent here, with you, but for one fleeting week I escaped and ran away to California. I went to visit friends who live in Oakland, and celebrate my friend Richard`s 40th birthday. The party was awesome, I have no photos - I`m sure you understand, they would be incriminate any number of people.

Above is my gift to Richard, a little installation in his yard. You can see all of the pictures HERE. It's made of the same flowers I used for the Bicycle. I think Rich liked it.

We took a road trip up to Monterey to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, you can see me above with my new friend Mr. Seahorse. The aquarium has some amazing exhibits including seahorses, jelly fish, and a kelp forest. I got to pet a Ray too - it wasn't as exciting as I thought it would be, it was slimy, cold and indifferent. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that a fish would be slimy and cold. Somewhere in the back of my mind I must have been expecting it to be like other petting zoos with docile, wide eyed animals eager to make your acquaintance for the price of a little feed.

After the Aquarium closed we took a stroll up the "boardwalk" on Cannery Row. It's not a real boardwalk, just highly polished kitsch, but entertainment was there if you looked closely. While on the hunt for an awesomely tacky fridge magnet, I came across something even better ... kitsch-wear. Above I model the Burger Hat. It was so awesome it had to come home. Maybe I'll try and render it as a knit pattern?

And here's the runner up, Mr. Krabs! He also made it back to Canada. As an aside, this beanie is really, really comfy.

The sea life and the kitsch were awesome, but the best part of this road trip was the drive. We took two cars up, and I was in the girls car (named as such because it was only Jessica and me - 2 girls, one car). Almost as soon as the engine turned over I started rooting through the box of CDs, which was full of I don't know what, when I came across a hand written CD titled Amy's Answering Machine. Me- "WHAT is Amy's Answering Machine?" Jessica - "Oh my God! You've *never* heard Amy's Answering Machine?!" OMG,it's roll on the ground, snarf your latte funny! (listen to some of it yourself). It's the answering machine messages left by a neurotic mother for her only daughter. And by neurotic, I mean she makes Woody Allen look like a dilettante. Jessica and I spent the next two hours listening to the disc over and over and over, trying to figure out who these people where, where they were from, and if it real? In the end, we decided that we wanted it to be real, so it is.

Here's my knitting listening to Big Audio Dynamite on the first day of the Outside Lands music festival in Panhandle Park in San Francisco. My knitting had lots of fun there. I had to figure out how to do a tubular cast-on in the middle of a field, without internet or books. I'm very impressed with the amount of knowledge crammed up in the corners of my brain, I didn't even know it was all up there.

In the end, I had an awesome time and will be going back to California some time when the weather sucks here. :-)